Tuesday, November 17th 2009
The Village of Canajoharie has currently banned parking on the east side of Church Street
There will be a public meeting held next Tuesday at 7pm at the Village Restaurant, 59 Church Street in Canajoharie. The meeting is about the proposed removal of parking on Church Street in Canajoharie. Currently, the Village of Canajoharie, in conjunction with the NYS Department of Transportation is holding a temporary parking trial, elilminating parking on the east side of Church Street this week, and then switching to the west side of Church Street next week (click here to read the notice).
This is part of the plan where the state will do a “Mill and Fill” of Church and Main Streets and Erie Blvd. (click here for a map of the Streetscape plan), as the Village will be replacing sidewalks and curbs throughout.
More details on the plan can be found in the Leader Herald article here.
Ugh. There’s enough trouble parking in Canjo.
I enjoyed a yummy lunch at the Village Restaurant (I think that was the name) a couple months ago. It was my first time there. The only problem I had was getting out of my parking spot because the street seemed to be too narrow with parking on both sides and traffic in both directions. I had to wait a while, but I finally found a chance to get out of my parking spot. Then I had to turn around, only to find out that I wasn’t able to drive around a building a little ways down, which my girlfriend (a former local…I’m not from around here) remembered as a way to get back in the direction we were headed. You can’t drive through there anymore, so we had to turn around but we were back on the road to our next destination.
The street has a nice down-home character to it that you don’t see much anymore. It would be more convenient to have parking on only one side of the street, but that would reduce the number of parking spots, someone would have to decide which side the parking should be on, and it could decrease the likelihood of people wanting to do business in that area if they have to walk too far. Having a parking lot close-by might help, but it shouldn’t be too far away.
Routing traffic way from this area (if possible) would probably be deterimental to the businesses on this street, so that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
Are there any buildings that are so run-down that they should be knocked down to make room for a parking lot? I don’t like the idea of knocking down buildings just to make room for parking (like they do in Utica, for example), but if a building is in such a state of disrepair that it should be knocked down, it might not be a bad idea. If the state wants to get involved with the narrowness of the street, maybe they should buy a run-down building (if there is one) and make it into a parking lot to make up for the loss of parking on the street.
Is it possible to widen the street by making the sidewalks narrower, thereby saving the existing number of parking spots? I don’t remember how wide the sidewalks are. Moving the buildings isn’t an option.
Another option is to install another traffic light so that traffic only flows in one direction at a given time, like they do when a road is closed down to one lane due to construction. I don’t know how much traffic flows through that area during it’s busiest times, so it might not work.
I don’t understand all of the variables, so I can’t offer a solid suggestion for the problem. If nothing else, I hope I have offered some suggestions that might be worthy of consideration. Canjo is a cool place to visit, and it would be a shame if something screwed that up.
I work in Utica, and the abandoned/unused buildings do not earn the city any revenue from taxes, and so are better off being leveled for parking. By doing this, cars have a place to park, and their occupants can then walk into businesses throughout the city. Centro provides busing, but I’m not familiar with their routes, however it may be feasible to use a Centro bus to get around town if the routes go places people like or need to go to (I suspect they do).
Canjo. would be wise to take clues from Utica–and Gloversville, for that matter–and raze these eyesores to increase parking, especially if the village wants to hold public events like Music on Main Street in the summertime.
Parking on only one side doesn’t seem to be the answer. I know the busnesses lost customers. I know I did not stop at the usual places I normally do because there was no place to park & I was on the wrong side of the Street. A better idea might be to make the sidewalks narrower.
Well, what I noticed was that everyone is driving faster now that the road is wider. Which causes more problems because more people are crossing the street to get to the side they are shopping on (if they bother to stop downtown anymore). Is it just me, or does it bring to mind to anyone else the ramifications of when Amsterdam “Improved” the downtown traffic patterns 30 years back…
The best thing is to eliminate parking altogether on Main Street. It’s just not wide enough to accommodate parked cars and moving cars. Plus, the fire department needs to make a hard turn with very long vehicles, and that turn is even more difficult with parked cars sitting like toads on a log. In place of on-street parking, set up a parking lot somewhere and everyone walks to the businesses–just like they did “back in the day.”
No parking? What madness is this? Where will people park? The two parking lots on Mohawk Street are owned by NBT for NBT business only, the one behind Peruzzis is harder to navigate than the street, and there’s one small one by the Methodist Church on East Main. There is less lot parking than street parking by far, and to think everone can use these without issue is insane. And where are these buildings you say should be knocked down? I know we have empty storefronts, but last I checked, each building in the downtown district have business and/or resident tenents in them.
As far as fire and large trucks, they have the truck route on Erie Blvd with a wider intersection to handle these turns.